


The Bird on the Box Hat

by sackofloveandwater



Series: The Marked [2]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Non-Consensual Kissing, mentions of dead bodies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 12:52:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9324428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sackofloveandwater/pseuds/sackofloveandwater
Summary: Vera Moray is a woman who has seen the very edge of the world looking for answers to unanswerable questions. Now that she knows them she has been told, very loudly and forcefully, that nothing she's seen ever existed. The Outsider however, continues to quietly exist and Vera does not want to stop looking for answers. A story examining how I see their relationship.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to continue with the series after all, hope you enjoy!

"I know of a legend," Vera said to him one day. She had made another offering, it looked like it was dug up from the _mud_. But he had to come, it was a kind of restless compulsion. "More of an idiom, really..."

He hummed. He looked out past her focussing on her Mortimer Hat box hat. It was a gaudy thing. Ribbons and bits of fruit hanging off it. He didn't really _understand_ this eras style. He'll just have to wait for minimalism to take over again he supposed.

" _The future's bliss is sealed with a kiss, and future's shame is sealed with the same_ ," she recited, concentrating. "Do you know what that could mean?"

The Outsider suppressed a sigh.

"Don't think on it."

"But it's popular in occult-"

"So is ritualist death," he bit. "Does that mean I approve of it?"

She looked at him, running her hands through her hair. Her nails were unmanicured, her face was unpowdered, but she took the hat?

"I'm just looking for an explanation."

He stared at the hat again and pictured one of the birds on it coming to life and flying free and straight for the window. She looked past her shoulder at the hat and laughed.

"Do you like my new hat?" she asked. "It's a funny little thing isn't it?" she smiled primly an impression of a _proper aristocratic lady_. "I picked it out myself, you know. I'll be the talk of the _town_."

He cocked his head to the side at her and she laughed at the gesture. "Did you really pick that out yourself?"

She blinked. "Well... yes."

He hummed. "Then I like it."

Vera raised her eyebrows in surprise, then smiled softly,running her hands over the cuffs of her jacket.

The Outsider turned. "Does your husband?"

“No,” Vera's smile fell. “He doesn't."

He looked at the ceiling.

"Too bad."

***

"I heard tales of a seawitch once," she said to him, tapping a pencil against a notebook. She had just gotten her nails done, her hair put together, but she was biting her cuticles _furiously_. She didn’t have her hat. "A seawitch who- who knew the language of The Leviathan, taught it to the native Pandyssians."

The Outsider blinked. "Yes I knew her."

Vera gasped. "You did! What was her name?"

He looked off.

"Tell me!"

He stared at the peeling wallpaper on the baseboards of room, the mildew in the abandoned house. "What would you do if I told you?"

She screamed and threw down her notebook. "You have given me nothing at all for months! And now! Now you give me _something_ and you won't elaborate! You're cruel! You're _cruel_!"

He continued staring at the baseboards as she circled to his face, getting down on her knees.

"Please I'm begging you," she said, "anything. You're my only friend. Please."

The Outsider looked at her. "Anything?"

She nodded, hair falling out of her carefully managed bun.

"Alright," he said, "step back."

She brushed her hair back and did as she was bid.

"When I was a boy I drowned in the ocean," he began. "I remember the feeling of water flooding my lungs, of the dark and the cold, the knowledge that I would die seeping slowly into my -"

She stared.

"Why are you telling me this? I don't care about this."

He stared back.

"Cartha," he muttered. "Her name was Cartha."

He looked to the ground as she scribbled in her notebook.

"She was a friend of mine."

***

Vera made an offering to the Void.

The blood of her husband smelled like copper and his flesh, boiled and covered in lye, was still burning in the bath tub in his room.

The carved human bone even now scratched itself across his skin. He could see it like a stain as she summoned him to her shrine, black as his eyes, as the shadows on the ends of her hair.

But an offering, like a song, like a compulsion, can’t be ignored for long.

"My dear," she said, her voice is soft, cloying, "I have a need of your assistance, a lesson, a small advice, that is all." Her voice grew pouty. "The magic, you see, it simply won't come."

She had given away the shoulder blades as gifts. The ribs as well. Bone charms and runes to a mute child born with a twisted tongue. 

He nodded, feigning disinterest in her dealings. This was the best way to play these games. 

"How unfortunate," he said. He knew all she was about to say in these moments, he could see the faint outlines of her life still, like a sketch of time itself and her decisions like brush strokes on the stretch and cut of an endless cloth.

"It truly is, my dear, it truly is. Now the rune!"

She pulled out the sacrum, polished and filed to look like whale ivory, it was a good imitation. Likely to have fooled anyone else. But the presence of it was like a file on his teeth, a knife swirling in his eye socket. His breath shudders and he listens to the sounds of a wolf on Pandyssia devouring it's kill, he feels the blood drip down its chin. The third of its five eyes is looking back at him, swivelling backwards into it's skull. 

He reached out and examined the carving and the very action was akin to peeling his skin back, curling the fibre of his muscle, cutting the nerves of his fingertips. He listened to an old one breathe onto the pebbles of a Morley beach, its breath was rotten and unseemly. It will sing no more songs of the great Dracona, and it long ago stopped hearing the voices of the Stars.

The Leviathan has abandoned them and the outsider did not care for their struggles. It will die as it lived, a silent and forgotten beast.

Its last song is about the cruelty of fate.

His grip increased imperceptively along the edges of the rune, causing fissures to form along the surface, like whisping, spidering threads. His disgust did not show itself on his face but it could be _felt_ in the room. The air had become denser, muggier, it became a labour to breathe.

He traced the etching on the hip bone. The human bone, so _beautifully_ polished to hide it's intents.

The rune was a perfect recreation. A copy without much knowledge of course, but copies had magic just as much as words and songs.

It needed no critique, because it was serving its function .

Humans, afterall, were different creatures from whales. Much stranger when it came to consolidating power. It flowed less evenly with them, pooled and sprang from different places. It pulled in different ways.

And when you made runes of their bones they became less channels of The Void's power and more...siphons.

But Vera could not understand magic as he did. She did not live in it. Did not feel it flow through her body like air. She did not know it's extensions. Boundaries. And when she wrote and weaved facsimiles of The Leviathan's power into bodies and bones, she could not _know_ all these things. Not fully.

And she was desperate for that. Knowledge, understanding. She always had been. Her powerlessness had always been compounded by her relative ignorance. She desired power, yes, but more than anything she wanted to _know_.

The Outsider allowed a small smile to flick onto his lips as he looked at the bone in his hands.

A hipbone for all the knowledge of The Void. What a desperate, childish plan.

He glanced up. Vera was looking at him with great anticipation. Her dark eyes were points, islands in the sea of her pale skin and powders. Islands filled with greed, ambition and an unquenchable desire for true _endless_  power.

One day, they would be swallowed whole.

He crushed the rune into dust, allowing the burning ash to drain past his hands onto the floor, like sand in an hourglass.

***

"You know I heard another tale," she said, fixing her hair by her vanity, her shrine now resting prominently in her living room along with her box hat.

"And what is that?"

"That a kiss from The Outsider can let you see into the future."

The Outsider laughed outright. "That's quite a-"

And then she was next to him, her lips were on his. He felt his hands clench and his body tense. For a moment, he couldn't move. He pushed her away, but she resisted, he pushed again and she pinned his arms. He felt his body get tighter and smaller as she pushed herself against him.

Then black smoke began to _billow_ out of their mouths and The Outsider _snarled_.

He opened his mouth wide and breathed hot, smoking air down Vera's throat.

Even then she wouldn't let him go, but he kept breathing until her mouth gaped in horror, ichor dripping from the bottom of her eyes, breath shuddering around the smoke in her throat.

Then when her eyes started to smell like sulphur he pulled away and let her stand there, clutching her face.

The Outsider spat on the ground and she began to scream incoherently, her eyes seeing some unspeakable horror concocted by The Void.

He stared at her for a moment, feeling something as she coiled and sobbed on the ground like a worm. Pity? Maybe.

He kept staring as Vera's sight burned away, fading away into the deep.

 And he thought of Cartha.

Sailing the high seas, whales flanking her sides, silks shimmering, lightening in her fingers, calling him a friend.

She was a good person, Cartha… a very good person.


End file.
